August 11, 2017

Departing Fred’s

Disclaimer: I imported this post from WordPress to Jekyll on 9/2/23. Forgive the misformatting until I get a chance to clean it up.

Today is my last day with Fred’s.

I joined the pharmacy IT group last year to replace their outgoing application developer. After a couple of weeks, IT leadership re-organized me under the general application development group serving both pharmacy and retail business applications.

Fred’s has been around a long time. Like many such organizations, it maintains legacy infrastructure and technical debt. Leadership in recent years has been making great strides in the modernization of systems and procedures. The development team is currently undergoing some significant rewrites creating modern .NET Core microservices hosted in the cloud. I honestly wish I could have been around to see the completion of that migration, and I am excited for what the team has in store for them.

I have grown tremendously in technical ability and customer service during my tenure. My skills in design patterns, .NET, SQL Server, SSIS, ORMs (Entity Framework & Dapper), UI (Kendo UI & DevExpress), and build tools (VSTS & BuildMaster) have rapidly improved thanks to an investment in education and refactoring by current management. I even got to learn a few oddball skills like JAMS and Elixir Repertoire.

I am thankful for the team, projects, and experiences that I have had at Fred’s. I sincerely hope that my time provided as much value to the company as it did to me. I wish the team the best of luck moving forward.